Twice Migrants’: Motivations, Experiences and Disillusionments of ItalianBangladeshis Relocating to London
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The new `twice migrants': motivations, experiences and disillusionments of Italian-Bangladeshis relocating to London Article (Accepted Version) Della Puppa, Francesco and King, Russell (2018) The new ‘twice migrants’: motivations, experiences and disillusionments of Italian-Bangladeshis relocating to London. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. ISSN 1369-183X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/75487/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk 1 The New ‘Twice Migrants’: Motivations, Experiences and Disillusionments of Italian- Bangladeshis Relocating to London Francesco Della Puppa1 and Russell King2 1Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padova, Italy [email protected] 2Department of Geography, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK [email protected] ABSTRACT Taking our cue from an earlier study of East African Asians who ‘onward-migrated’ to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, this paper looks at the more recent phenomenon of Bangladeshi immigrants in Italy who are onward-migrating to London. We seek to answer three questions. First, why does this migration occur? Second, how does the ethnic group we call ‘Italian-Bangladeshis’ narrate their working lives in London and to what extent do they feel ‘at home’ there? Third, what are the gaps between their expectations held before the move and the actual social and economic conditions they encounter in London? Empirical evidence comes from 40 in-depth interviews with Italian-Bangladeshis who have already onward-migrated or plan to. Most Italian-Bangladeshis move to London to escape socially limiting factory work in Italy, to invest in the educational future of their children, and to join the largest Bangladeshi community outside of their home country. In 2 London they describe feeling more ‘at home’ than in Italy, due to the size and multiple facilities of the Bangladeshi community, their lack of ‘visibility’ and of racialisation, and the greater sense of religious freedom. But their onward-migration experience has its more negative sides: the inability to access more than low-paid casual work in London’s service economy, the cost of housing, and the difficulty of making social contacts beyond their ethnic community, especially with those they regard as ‘natives’, i.e. ‘white’ British. KEYWORDS: onward migration; Italian-Bangladeshis; London; migration aspirations; education of children Introduction In her classic text Twice Migrants, Parminder Bhachu (1985) documents the onward-migrated community of East African Sikhs through their resettlement in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. She describes them as ‘twice removed’, having originally left the Punjab during the early years of the 20th century as indentured labour to build the Kenya-Uganda railway, and thence to the UK in the wake of the Africanisation of the post-independence African countries. Several decades later we observe another group of South Asian ‘twice migrants’, this time originating from Bangladesh and arriving in the UK via an intermediate migration to Italy. According to a recent article in The Independent, The melting pot that is East London is gaining a distinctive new flavour – thanks to the arrival of thousands of Bangladeshi-Italian migrants fleeing economic stagnation in southern Europe. An estimated 6,000 such families have come to the UK over the past three 3 or four years, the majority settling in East London… They are making their mark in the Tower Hamlets Bangladeshi community and beyond, opening coffee shops and forming their own welfare associations to welcome new arrivals (Clarke 2015). This intriguing historical parallel should not be overstretched, since there are significant differences. Firstly, the length of stay in the initial migratory destination has been up to 25 years in Italy, but it lasted two or three generations in East Africa. Secondly, there is a marked difference in the strength of connection to the original ‘homeland’: East African Asians in Britain generally have few links to the Indian subcontinent, whereas the Bangladeshis are still in touch with their country of origin and make regular visits. Thirdly, the respective onward migrants opted for different places of settlement in England. East African Asians mainly settled in suburban West London and in Midland cities, notably Leicester, whereas the Bangladeshis onward-migrating from Italy have targeted the traditional areas of Bangladeshi residence in inner East London, initially focused on Tower Hamlets, nowadays extending eastwards to Ilford (Bhachu 1985, 3–8; Carey and Shukur 1985). On a wider plane, our study of Bangladeshis’ relocation from Italy to the UK is part of an emergent literature on onward migration, which critiques the conceptualisation of international migration as a simple bipolar event – a move from country A to country B. Globalisation and globally networked migration trajectories give rise to a plurality of migration pathways which subvert the linear model of origin–destination. ‘Onward migration’ is our preferred term for the phenomenon that we explore with the Bangladesh-Italy-UK case, although there are several other terms scattered across the migration literature, including transit migration (Collyer and de Haas 2010), secondary migration (Bang Nielsen 2004), transmigration (Mueller 2004), stepwise international migration (Paul 2011), serial migration (Ossman 2004), as well as the older ‘twice- 4 migration’ couplet (Bhachu 1985). Yet, few empirical studies have been conducted to explain why some immigrants choose to move to other countries instead of settling down in the first country or returning to their countries of origin. Taking the case of Bangladeshi migrants in Europe, this study poses three sets of research questions. First, and most fundamentally, why do they onward-migrate from Italy to the UK? How do they articulate the mix of push and pull factors to frame their decision to move to another immigration country? Second, what are their experiences of employment and socio-cultural life in the UK? Do they achieve upward social and economic mobility, or is this an illusion? Thirdly, to the extent that there are ambivalences and disillusionments in their ‘new’ lives in London, what are the negative aspects of their migration experiences? The rest of the article unfolds as follows. First, we sketch some necessary background about the European context of onward migration, and the specific history of diverse waves of Bangladeshi migration to the UK and Italy. A section on fieldwork methods then follows. Three main sections present our empirical findings, corresponding to the research questions posed above. The conclusion highlights the paper’s most significant and original findings, evaluates their theoretical implications, and suggests avenues for future research, including the possible impact of Brexit. Bangladeshis in Europe: a Community on the Move Moving on from Bhachu’s monograph, existing studies of onward migration within Europe have been mainly on refugee groups (notably Somalis and Iranians – see Ahrens, Kelly, and van Liempt 2016; Bang Nielsen 2004; van Liempt 2011) or African economic migrants from countries such as Nigeria (Ahrens 2013) or Senegal (Toma and Castagnone 2015). More similar to our study are two recent analyses of onward migration of Latin Americans from Spain to the UK (Mas Giralt 2017; Ramos 2017). These studies reveal that onward migrations within Europe are driven by several 5 motives: i) overcoming barriers to employment and career progression; ii) educational opportunities, including improving the education and life-chances of children; iii) escaping racism, discrimination and islamophobia; iv) diaspora-related motives – joining relatives, friends and larger co-ethnic communities; v) social, political and cultural reasons, including the wish to be part of a more cosmopolitan, multicultural society. Later, we will see how the group we henceforth call the ‘Italian-Bangladeshis’ fit into this typology. The story of Bangladeshi migration to the UK has been well-told by Gardner (1995, 2002) and Zeitlyn (2016), with special reference to the main diasporic community in inner East London. Very briefly, the migration started with the East India Company’s recruitment of seamen from the Sylhet province of Bangladesh in the nineteenth century; over time, some of these seamen